Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) (7 page)

I pray for salvation from my dark past, and for a peaceful and righteous way to lead these captive sisters of mine to safety.

Viktor

A
leksio has me
help him with the money-laundering surveillance and the plans for the heist. He thinks I need something to focus on other than Valhalla. Maybe he’s right.

Still I watch Tanechka and track the feeds. I sleep perhaps a little more, but I have to watch her. Sometimes Yuri helps, sometimes Mischa. These brothers of mine understand.

When two weeks are up, I win the virginity auction on the street urchin named Nikki for a mere $2,678, which means it’s time for us to focus there.

The men who run the brothel told me what to expect: that I’ll be put in the back of a van and blindfolded for the trip, which will last two hours. I’ll be checked for transmitting devices, weapons, and anything else suspicious. I’ll have a maximum of two unobserved hours with this Nikki, during which time I may do anything aside from striking, choking, maiming, or killing her.

I put in my request for her to be tied and gagged, and I meet the Valhalla van at the bus station downtown as instructed. I’m posing as a German businessman with very little English. I wear a fat suit, a blond wig, and a fake tattoo on my neck. Aleksio teased me that disguises such as this are so KGB, so Russian spy. In fact they are. Some of the old men in the Russian
mafiya
got their start in the KGB. We learned much from them.

I’m instructed to hold out my arms. They bring out the wand. Relief flows through my heart when I see the wand is the type we predicted they would use. The tools I’ve brought are hidden in my fat suit, encased in a pouch with a device designed to manipulate the waves and send them back in a format that tells the men that I carry no hardware or no transmitting devices of any kind.

I promised Aleksio that I would abort the mission if they tried with any other type of wand. It was a difficult promise to make.

I ride alone in the back of a windowless van. I take my blindfold off, tracking turns, listening to the route, forming a map in my mind. The trip takes two hours, though I’m quite sure we haven’t left the metro area.

I’m even more sure of this after they blindfold me again and lead me out; the feel of the air alone tells me we’re near Lake Michigan.

I’m led into a structure that smells of new lumber and taken downstairs, as I knew I would be.

We stop, and they remove my blindfold. I’m in a hall in a finished basement flanked by two men, both armed. Guards are stationed on each end of the hall, also armed. Gray carpet underfoot, fluorescent lights above. Tanechka could make a bomb of such lights.

I remind myself she doesn’t need my help.

A manager of some kind with a thick white beard comes up and explains the rules to me. He, too, is armed. I nod, keeping my posture humble as I make my assessments: a corridor, exits at either end, five doors on either side. I merge this with the map I created in my head from watching the girls, noting where they are relative to the sun.

Tanechka is up and over.

I can feel her—that’s the worst part. My soul orients to her as a flower strains toward the sun.

The manager tells me the rules in slow, careful English. He wants to make sure I understand. I assure him that I understand, I repeat everything back to him, working to get the full sense of the place before I’m sequestered away. Carpet all around is good. Everything muffled.

I remind myself of the promise I made to Aleksio—unless Tanechka is in danger and needs me, I will not leave the parameters of my mission. I’ll plant the surveillance and get out. I will not go to her.

The burly guard shows me his watch. “Knock when you’re finished. If you use the full two hours, you’ll have a ten-minute warning.”

He opens the door. Nikki is inside, tied to a chair as I’d requested, glaring up at me. She grunts and protests from behind her gag.

The door shuts and I lock it, though I’m sure they can come in at any time. The room is frilly. Part of the fantasy. It disgusts me. The soundproofing looks good, though. This will work in my favor.

I turn my attention to Nikki in her white dress, rage in her eyes. Even muffled by the gag, her insults come through. She calls me a disgusting pervert with a small dick and so forth. An American.

“This is the last time I touch you,” I say to her. “Got it? But you must stay still.”

She doesn’t believe me. No surprise, but she’ll see. I take the ear plugs from my pocket and stick them into her ears, no easy feat with her head moving so wildly. Then I take the pillowcase and put it over her head. She writhes around, screams muffled.

I ignore her and check the room for cameras, running my fingers along the molding and the fixtures. They promise no cameras as a part of the terms of the auction, but one never knows.

I pull my tools from the pouch in my suit. The first thing I do is to I turn on the beacon so Aleksio and the others can get the location. Next, I use heat imaging equipment to plumb the walls in search of a mass of electronic equipment. If the server area doesn’t adjoin this room, my job is all the more difficult.

Ten feet down the wall to the west I pick up the telltale heat signs of servers. Good. I pull out my tiny circular saw, which runs from a battery pack. Very quiet. I move a dresser and cut a hole in the wall behind it. I run a cable through. I have only a rigid cable with which to maneuver a thumb drive into the port, something I practiced with our tech guy. Using these tools on the ends of rigid cables is like writing a message with a ten-foot-long pen—difficult, to say the least, and there is always the risk of toppling the stack. It takes me the better part of an hour to get the thing in.

When it’s in, I text out with the phone I smuggled in. The hack is live. I pull my cable out. This is going well.

That’s when I see her staring at me. She got the fucking pillowcase off, and she knows now. Will she talk if pressed? Will she use this information to secure herself favors in this place? To secure her freedom?

I put my finger over my lips, then I finish my job. I wrap the cables, shove them into the fat suit pouch, and carefully replace the panel I sawed away. I use a kit to mix up a pigment of putty and swipe it around, then I replace the dresser.

Fifteen minutes left. I turn to Nikki. Again the fear comes into her eyes. I shake my head and remove her earplugs, but not the gag. “I’m your friend,” I say. “Understand?”

She nods.

“You will say nothing of this.”

She shakes her head no, yes, no, grunting, desperate to communicate.

I sigh and remove the gag. “Take me with you,” she whispers. “You can do it. I can tell you how!”

I kneel in front of her. “If I take you with me, it means I rescue one person. But with what we learn here? We rescue everybody here today and everybody who will ever be here.”

“And I fucking care about that why?”

“Because I care about it, that’s why,” I tell her.

“Take me.”

“Not an option,” I say. “You have exactly two choices. You keep quiet about what you just saw and we pull you all out in two weeks, or you tell what you saw and you never get out.”

She gives me a piercing look, and I know she’s thinking about the angles. The third and fourth options. This is a type of girl I know well.

“You want to be a fool and try bargaining with these people?” I put my hands on either arm of her chair and get really close. “You think they’ll honor anything? I’m your only hope.”

She just watches me. She knows. She gets it. “I want to go home,” she whispers.

I stand. “I watch you all. It’s not so bad.”

She glares at me. “Yeah, not bad for me yet. But I won’t be in this room after your visit. I go somewhere worse. An underground brothel and it’s not nice like this one.”

“We’ll find you,” I say.

“Thanks a fucking lot,” she says.

I sit on the bed. We didn’t think of where Nikki would go after this. They will see her as having been used up. Her virginity gone. I can only imagine the type of brothel she’ll go to now.

“This is the best we can do. It’s this or nothing, Nikki. We’ll find you.”

She looks away.

I kneel in front of her. “We’ll come for you.”

She shakes me off with curses.

“Did you meet the other women here?”

She shrugs.

“Have you met the nun?”

She snorts.

“What’s so funny?”

“Her god isn’t helping her much, is he?”

“So it would appear,” I say. “How does she seem?”

“Um…like a nun,” Nikki says. “I don’t know why everyone loves her. Especially the Russian girls. All she knows is the Bible. She doesn’t remember shit from her past.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Amnesia. Like on a soap opera?”

I feel the blood drain from my face.

“She doesn’t remember shit until two years ago when she woke up in some tree on a mountainside. She only knows her name from a tattoo. She thinks Jesus is her savior.” Nikki flips her dark hair from her eyes. “Some savior. I think she should go see Jesus for a refund, if you ask me.”

Tanechka remembers nothing?
A nun makes sense as a cover. But a nun with amnesia?

My heart thunders. All this time I imagined she was on a mission. That my hands-off stance helped her. That she could protect herself if it came to it…

“What does she do when they mistreat her?”

“Um…have you ever seen that bumper sticker ‘What Would Jesus Do?’”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s a nun, dude. She doesn’t give a crap if they shove her around.”

The room swims before my eyes. Tanechka had a temper. She never allowed people to mistreat her.

These men could do anything to her, and she wouldn’t be able to stop them. Maybe they
have
done things.

I put her in this place sure as anything the day I threw her into the gorge.
Predatel
, I called her. Traitor. Betrayer.

“And then there’s what her buyer will do,” Nikki continues. “Though my money’s on Charles in Charge doing the nun way before that.”

I stiffen. “Charles in Charge?”

“The psycho that runs this place. He makes her eat with him sometimes, like this sicko date thing. You know that movie where there’s a devil boy and all the animals run away from him? Add twenty years and Axe body spray and you get Charles. Everybody’s all about the nun. The guard who let you in here with the beard like biker Santa Claus? We think he wants to throw up those black skirts too—they demoted him here to the basement. Who knew the hot blonde nun thing was so powerful with guys? Everyone wants a piece of nun ass, and now here you come—”

“Enough.”

I stand and look at my watch. Thirteen minutes. I gave my word that I wouldn’t grab Tanechka unless she was in danger.

“She is in danger.” I say it aloud.

Nikki begins again to speak, calling me Sherlock.

“Quiet—let me think.”

Nikki quiets.

I pinch the sides of my nose. Aleksio and the gang are probably in the neighborhood by now. The plan was that I would leave the way I came, allowing these people to blindfold me and drive me back. Aleksio and the gang were to follow.

This is no longer the plan. It cannot be.

I go and put my ear to the door. “You said the guard with the big white Santa beard is obsessed with the nun?”

Nikki nods.

“What kind of guy is he? Would he do anything impulsive? Stupid?”

“Besides being a guard at a virgin brothel?”

“How obsessed is he? Does everyone think it?”

“Like I said, they moved him down off her floor. Didn’t trust him around her. Seriously, what is it about a blonde nun?”

“She’s up and two rooms to the right?”

Nikki narrows her eyes. “How do you know?”

I pull off my belt.

Her eyes go wide. “What are you doing?”

I peel a pair of plastic shivs from the inside of it. “It’s your lucky day. You’re getting out of here. You know how to defend yourself?”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Tell me. Tell me what you can do. Can you shoot a gun? Be honest.”

“You got a gun?”

“Not yet.”

She gives me a slow smile. “Sure, I can shoot.”

I cut the ropes from her wrists and feet. “Pocket these. We can’t leave them.”

“I don’t have pockets but…” She loops the rope loosely around her neck and ties bits together and stuffs it all under her dress. Good. Obeying without question. This can work. I can save Tanechka
and
the mission.

“You ever hold up a place?”

She nods.

“Successfully?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I was in the Lady Sixx. You know who that is? It’s a girl gang.”

“You ever shoot anyone?”

She gives me a look—steady and straight and right into my eyes. “I’m a hundred percent. Whatever you need.”

Good enough.

“I’m going to break the nun out and make it look like the Santa guard took her. We’ll make it look like you got lucky and grabbed your chance to escape.”

“Why the nun? The nun’s gonna be dead weight.”

I eye her, turning the shiv over and over, an extension of my hand. “Maybe
you’re
dead weight.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Santa beard is going to come and knock to warn me in two minutes. Will he come alone?”

“Yeah,” she says. “But there have been times when the men don’t want to go when their two hours are up, and then they come in with three guards. But that’s after.”

“Okay.” I draw a map of the basement on the carpet with my finger. Nikki helps me do the next floor and together we develop a plan. The girl’s good; she’s been paying attention to her environment, making plans of her own. She knows about a large duct. It’s good information that I didn’t have.

We decide she’ll hold the obsessed guard at gunpoint inside this room while I get Tanechka. I stress that her job is to hold him and keep him quiet until I’m back.

“I got it,” she says.

I nod at the shiv in her hand. “You may have to use that. We may have to get bloody before this is over.”

She nods. This girl will lose no sleep over getting bloody in this place.